Black Hole Caught Snacking on 'Super Jupiter' Planet

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In a cosmic first, astronomers have discovered a black hole
chowing down on what may be a giant rogue planet.

The supermassive
black hole didn't finish off its meal, which scientists say
was either a huge Jupiter-like planet wandering freely through
space or a brown dwarf, a strange object that's larger than a
planet yet still too small to trigger the internal fusion
reactions required to become a full-fledged star.

“This is the first time where we have seen the disruption of a
substellar object by a
black hole," study co-author Roland Walter, of the
Observatory of Geneva in Switzerland, said in a statement. "We
estimate that only its external layers were eaten by the black
hole, amounting to about 10 percent of the object’s total mass,
and that a denser core has been left orbiting the black hole."

Researchers made the discovery using the European Space Agency's
Integral space observatory, which noticed an X-ray flare coming
from the center of a galaxy 47 million light-years away called
NGC 4845. [ Black
Hole Snacks on Super Jupiter (Video) ]

Follow-up observations by several other instruments — including
ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Swift space telescopes and Japan's
MAXI X-ray monitor on the International
Space Station — allowed the team to trace the outburst's
maximum to January 2011, when NGC 4845 brightened by a factor of
1,000 before dimming again over the next year or so.

"The observation was completely unexpected, from a galaxy that
has been quiet for at least 20–30 years," lead author Marek
Nikolajuk, of the University of Bialystok in Poland, said in a
statement.

By studying the flare's properties, the team determined that the
emission likely resulted when NGC 4845's central black hole —
which is as massive as 300,000 suns — fed on an object with a
mass between 14 and 30 times that of Jupiter.

That mass range corresponds to a brown dwarf, also known as a
failed star. But it's also possible that the unfortunate object
is quite a bit smaller, with a mass just a few times that of
Jupiter, researchers said. If that's the case, then the galaxy's
black hole was probably ripping apart a free-floating gas giant
planet.

Such "rogue planets," which have been ejected from their native
solar systems by gravitational interactions, are thought to be
incredibly common throughout the universe. One recent study, for
example, estimated that
rogues outnumber "normal" planets with obvious parent stars
by at least 50 percent in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The Milky Way's enormous central black hole is set to have a meal
of its own soon. A gas cloud as massive as several Earths is
spiraling toward the black hole and should be gobbled up later
this year, astronomers say.

Observing more such events should help researchers better
understand how black holes feed.

"Estimates are that events like these may be detectable every few
years in galaxies around us, and if we spot them, Integral, along
with other high-energy space observatories, will be able to watch
them play out just as it did with NGC 4845," said Christoph
Winkler, ESA's Integral project scientist.

The new study was published this month in the journal Astronomy
& Astrophysics.